December Ultimatum (9 page)

‘For the time being.’

‘You want me to find Schneider?’

‘No. There are a few thousand police doing that. We want you to go to Fahd.’

‘Why me? I’m not a regular. I’m not even Security.’

‘It’s got to be you. The Brits can cope but the Director wants our own man on the inside. He’s got a plan. You get it later, but you’re very much part of it.’

‘I said why me? You’ve got a thousand younger, better- trained regulars, so why push me in?’

‘Fahd has met you. He likes you. Better, he trusts you. He won’t take anyone else, not someone he doesn’t know, not at a time like this. It’s got to be you.

Franklin shook his head slowly. Then he stubbed the cigarette on the heel of his shoe and let it fall on the carpet.

‘Have you explained all this to the
New York Times
or have you just put my name in the obituaries? Christ! D’you think I can just wander off—’

‘Listen. You’re not the only thing that’s going for us, but you are one of them. Your paper knows nothing yet, but we’ll give them something—a medical report—saying you’ve gotta be kept under medical surveillance, best attention, not terminal. We’ll have something for them, don’t worry.’

‘You reckon they’ll swallow that crap? They’ll expect to hear from me.’

‘They will. You can file to them tonight out of the Embassy We’ll see it first, of course.’

Franklin began to laugh quietly, which made Joe in the front seat look back over his shoulder.

‘You want fat and flabby Franklin who hasn’t seen action or anything like it in years to go chase Mai . . .’

‘Before she kills King Fahd.’

‘You know Cheaney, it’s guys like you that give the
CIA
a bad name. Okay, so it’s not you, it’s Washington. So I blame Heinzerling, and he blames Johns. Now you just telephone one of them and tell them that I’m leaving here all right, but not for London and wherever the goddamned Lake District is. I’m catching Pan-Am to New York, and if you want me after that you’ll have to send a snowman to get me out of New Hampshire. I’m back in the news trade, Cheaney, and I’m staying there. You just tell them that.’

Franklin sat back and let his head fall against the cushioned headrest. He stared at the patterns made by the oncoming car headlamps on the vinyl roof lining. Then he closed his eyes and thought of a shower, and a shave and clean clothes. And then perhaps a steak from the Embassy freezer. Then file. Then sleep. And no dreams.

‘Franklin.’

‘Forget it, Cheaney, I’m not listening.’

‘Then hear this. Heinzerling told me to tell you something just in case our conversation went the wrong way.’

‘Not the wrong way, Cheaney. The only way.’

‘He said that if you let the Agency down, he’ll blow your cover with your paper. He’ll blow it to the Correspondents Association. You’ll never work again. You’d be disgraced. That’s what Heinzerling said.’

Franklin kept his eyes closed. In the blackness there was suddenly a ball of red, like a revolving meteor that was coming away at the edges as it spun, tiny bits of matter exploding in the blackness. Then it spun out of the corner of his eye and just as suddenly he was standing on Brooklyn Bridge and the steel girders were flashing brilliantly. Through the steel mesh he saw a raft floating downstream, then the raft became a Swiss flag and, huddled on it, the Swiss father, mother and children from Riyadh. They waved, and he opened his eyes and the car was passing through the iron gates of the American Embassy and into the floodlit compound. The car doors were opened each side by tall white-capped Marines in white gloves who saluted as Cheaney got out.

‘Take it easy, Matt,’ he said. ‘Easy. I’ve got to get through to Washington. Tell them all you’ve told me. Joe here’ll get that call to the
New York Times
for you, just as soon as you’ve had a wash-up. We’ll get you through as fast as we can. Christ! You’ve got one helluva story to tell them. One helluva story.’

CAMP DAVID

‘When the chips are down’

The President jogged until eight, took a cold shower, and in his blue towelling dressing-gown breakfasted on grapefruit and yoghurt.

By eight forty-five he had shaved and dressed and sat on the terrace of Aspen Lodge drinking his second pot of black bitter sugarless coffee. He looked out across the lawns towards the copse of brown and orange maples. The overnight frost had covered the ground in a thin skin of white, and he watched a couple of woodcock beyond the gravel path tugging at a thin crust of toast one of the security men had thrown to them. Beyond them, as the lawns sloped away, he could see squirrels sitting on their haunches peering back.

Camp David, perched high on the Catactin range of mountains in the State of Maryland, is thirty minutes’ flying time by Presidential helicopter from the White House. It is where American Presidents traditionally go in retreat, sometimes to escape political blunders, often to pause and prepare political offensives. It is a luxury estate made entirely of local wood stained in various shades of browns and greens, set in twenty acres of electrified wire-enclosed woodland. Here the air is clear and clean. Here a man can believe he has vision.

The President had made a private departure from Washington and flown in just after midnight. Instead of taking off from the helipad in the White House grounds, in full view of the press who worked in shifts like sentries watching every coming and going, the President and three of his security staff had driven out of the staff gate in a Volkswagen Beetle belonging to someone in the typing pool. Then over the Potomac using the 14th Street Bridge, past the Jefferson Memorial to the busy and anonymous helipad at National Airport. The President, all enquirers were later told, was working in his private rooms and could not be disturbed.

The ruse was necessary. The American and International news media had been placated by Press Secretary Peter Schlesinger’s initial press release, quickly followed up by a television briefing to two hundred accredited journalists inside the White House by Foreign Affairs spokesman Tom Sorenson. But there were pressmen with a nose for the impending, who smelt something bigger on the way, and those who had followed the President’s career for twenty years and more thought they knew what it might be. So it would not have been wise for the President to be seen flying to Camp David because Camp David spelt crisis and crisis and an hysterical press were something the President had to avoid.

He had this one December day to prepare. The Generals had convinced him it could be done, and Sorenson had endorsed his own fears of what would happen if they didn’t take the initiative, and take it quickly. The phrase the oil boffin Professor Grüber had used in that first briefing in the Oval Office kept repeating itself in his mind. He had gone to sleep with it. He had woken up and it was still there. ‘Oil now has a greater power potential than the entire American Military because without it there is no American Military.’ Units of the Rapid Deployment Force were ready, waiting for his order to go. What he had to do now was to sell it to the country.

He turned to the sound of footsteps on the gravel path. ‘Hey, Peter, I didn’t hear you come down.’

‘Morning, Mr President. We landed way over there. Didn’t want to disturb you.’ The Press Secretary, Peter Schlesinger, came on to the terrace.

‘You can take it from me,’ said the President, ‘that I’ve been disturbed for a day now and I’m likely to remain that way for some days to come.’ He poured himself more black coffee. ‘Want some?’

‘No, thank you, sir.’

‘What you got?’

‘You’re booked nationwide, live tonight. The Nets are satelliting direct to Eurovision and to Asia. Moscow will take it off the European feed. They’ll be seeing you late by their time, but we’ll warn them through a Priority Release your Address to the Nation is of major importance.’

‘Don’t overplay it. Sorenson’s right. We’ve got to appear as if we’re only just realizing how few options we have left.’ ‘I understand.’

‘You’ve booked me after the news shows?’

‘Yessir. If we went on before them we’d face immediate reaction, immediate analysis, and inevitable criticism. This way they’ll have to wait.’

The President heard more feet. It was his secretary, Mrs Baines, who would type the speech and speechwriter Theodore Austin who would help him write it.

‘Morning everybody’, the President said. ‘I’ve got a message. Is anyone going to help me deliver it?’

‘Morning, Mr President,’ the two answered together. As the president rose and they followed him from the terrace into the study they found the housekeeper already lighting a fire.

The early morning sunlight from the east was being overtaken by grey clouds coming from the north-west and with them the beginning of a wind. A gust caught one of the woodcocks unawares, throwing it off balance as the other took the crust of toast and disappeared quickly up into the trees. The squirrels were already back in their bolt-holes in the oaks, and the boughs of the maples and chestnuts shook and carpeted the ground-frost with leaves.

Within ten minutes each of the three new arrivals to Aspen Lodge had gone to their separate rooms, to resolve their separate problems. The President was alone at his desk, sideways to the log fire, facing the windows that looked out across the terrace and the lawns. In front of him, neatly laid out on the desk, were the transcripts brought by speech- writer Austin, transcripts selected by him of all the most famous and most persuasive of Presidential speeches over the past forty years: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter. All the speeches had a common denominator, what Austin had called their ‘spirit’. The President looked at each title in turn, the dates, the subject matter. They were all crisis speeches. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ speech enticing the American people to go to war against the Nazis. Eisenhower’s January 1961 speech on his retirement, warning the free world of new Communist aggression. John Kennedy on Berlin and Cuba. Lyndon Johnson on widening the Vietnam War, Nixon on getting deeper into that war by bombing Haiphong, and on getting out again leaving the South to its despair. And Carter’s State of the Union address in February 1980 on Soviet aggression in Afghanistan.

The only one missing, he thought, was the Gettysburg Address. He picked up the red pencil Austin had brought with him. ‘Ring what you like,’ Austin had said, ‘even if it’s only a word. Write in the margins, an idea or a paraphrase. They are model speeches, and they did the trick, did what they were supposed to do at the moment they were delivered. They won over a suspicious America, and granted to each President separate permission to move in the direction he wanted to go.’

The President did not question his speechwriter. Austin knew his business well enough. He had worked magic for lesser men in less plausible causes at less critical times, and anyway, if the President had any doubts, he had to forget them. He couldn’t possibly write the speech himself.

He pencilled a line under Roosevelt’s ‘. . . those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ It was short but powerful, and captured the spirit as no other had done until J. F. Kennedy had come along.

He dropped it on the floor by the desk and began thumbing through Eisenhower. ‘. . . throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace and foster progress in human achievements.’ Five minutes later Eisenhower was lying on Roosevelt.

Then he reached for Lyndon Johnson, defending the use of B-52 bombers on Hanoi—the first time since Korea that American warplanes had been used against another nation. ‘We must stop Communist aggression,’ he had said, ‘before it stops us. And ask yourselves what kind of world are we prepared to live in in five months or five years from tonight?’ A good speech, delivered with all of Johnson’s melodrama. But it had done the trick. It won over a suspicious America.

Johnson followed Eisenhower and Roosevelt on to the carpet and the President reached across the desk for the transcripts marked John F. Kennedy. He smoothed out the paper and ran the tip of the red pencil slowly along the famous Kennedy lines. ‘Ask not what America can do for you. Rather ask what you can do for America.’

He ringed boldly in red ‘. . . the United States cannot tolerate deception or threats from any nation, large or small . . . let every nation know we shall pay any price . . . bear any burden . . . for the survival and success of liberty.’

The President shuffled the Kennedy transcripts together and he placed them back on the desk to the right of the last transcript marked Richard Nixon.

He picked up the Nixon transcript and saw that speech- writer Austin had already ringed some passages. On part of a television address on Nixon’s reasons for going into Cambodia to attack the Ho Chi Minh trail, Austin had ringed in red twice and had written, ‘This is it.’ The President read:

‘If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation acts like a pitiful helpless giant . . . all other nations will be on notice that, despite its overwhelming power, when the real crisis comes the United States will be found wanting.’

It was ten minutes past twelve. The President had been through the speeches and had drafted his own simple outline. Austin would add to this all the relevant data concerning oil imports and energy prospects given him by Professor Grüber. Austin would then write the first draft adapted to the President’s vernacular, making it the President’s own. When corrections and modifications had been finalized, the President would deliver it in front of the mirror above the fireplace, watching himself as Schlesinger and Austin watched him, correcting faulty intonation or over-emphasis, or an important line not stressed enough, until they were satisfied. Then the President would speak it uninterrupted into a small pocket tape recorder and, during his after-lunch walk in the garden, he would listen to his own voice through the tiny earpiece clipped to the lobe of his ear. He would hear himself a dozen times over until he was confident enough to speak it out loud repeating word for word what he heard in his ear, following exactly its speed and style. This was how he would deliver his address to the nation tonight. It would appear unprompted and spontaneous for maximum effect.

The speech would be beamed live from one satellite twenty-two thousand miles high in space to the next, across the Atlantic to the European capitals and to Moscow, across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific to Peking. By ten minutes past seven, Central Eastern Time, the President’s ultimatum would be known to the world.

He got up from his desk, ready for his lunch, and waited for Mrs Baines to take away the marked transcripts, his notes and the empty coffee pot. He opened the French windows to go out on to the terrace for exercise and fresh air, stopped and then drew a cross with the red pencil on the back of his left hand.

He walked slowly down the steps on to the lawns and a security man, dressed in a winter Burberry and brogues, followed twenty yards behind. The President knew him as Jed and recognized him as the man who had driven the Volkswagen to National Airport, a conspicuous man, he thought, to be in security—with bright ginger hair and freckles on his face the size of golfballs.

It was freezing again and there was snow in the air. The morning cloud had now come together, and everywhere was a dull grey with the wind constant from the north-west. The wind and the smell of snow were the usual forerunners of a blizzard.

He liked Camp David, but like every other American he associated it with crisis. Presidents only came here in trouble. Except Eisenhower, who had come simply because he liked the place and liked it so much he had had a nine-hole golf course built, with the first tee a ten-yard walk from the breakfast room of Aspen Lodge. The camp had been named after his son. Presidents now, with a greater sense of urgency, used the green instead as a convenient helicopter pad.

The holly bushes were covered in berries promising a good winter—or was it bad, he could never remember. The holly and the ivy and Christmas so soon. He picked a dark green shiny leaf and, one by one, nipped off the prickly corners and flipped them in the air with his finger and thumb. If he could survive until Christmas he knew he would survive another seven Christmases as President.

The air was suddenly icy and as he turned back to the house for the housekeeper’s pea and bacon soup, the frost crunched under him and he saw his own footprints. In an instant he was back more than forty years with his two brothers, lying on the ground, playing with their toy lorries on such a frozen patch, cutting trucking routes with their fingers through the frozen wastelands of a child’s Alaska in a wintry Boston suburban garden.

It was dark before time. The snow clouds were almost touching the peaks of the Catactins and the wind was shaking the blades of the small Bell helicopter parked on the green by Aspen Lodge. The floodlights picked out the small Presidential insignia on its nose and the two crewmen standing by the open door slammed their arms around their bodies and jogged on the spot to keep themselves from freezing. Five minutes before they had been drinking hot chocolate in the warm kitchen. Then came a message that the President was leaving for Washington before the weather closed in. The President’s bodyguard stood by the rotor arm at the tail, the collar of his overcoat up to his eyes, covering the golfball freckles.

The upstairs lights had just been switched off and the only lights in the lodge now were in the kitchen and in the President’s study. The curtains had not been drawn and the crewmen and the bodyguard could see him clearly, standing in his shirtsleeves, his tie half way down his chest, in front of the fireplace. He was talking to himself in the mirror, waving an arm, clenching a fist, snapping a finger. They watched in the dark, fascinated.

At fifteen minutes past five, the curtains of the study were drawn quickly and the house lights went out. The bodyguard ran across the lawn to the terrace and the crewmen began their start-up procedures. Seconds later the President appeared in a heavy fawn mohair overcoat and long multicoloured hand-knitted scarf wound high around his neck.